Drunken Teen Driver Veers off the Road and Kills Sleeping Los Angeles Homeless People
A set of sleeping homeless people were killed Sunday morning when an allegedly drunken 19-year-old driver veered off the road and drove over them. The vehicle stopped after having dragged the homeless people to their deaths for a few yards. The driver was arrested and incarcerated.
Carmen Elena Chavez was allegedly concluding a night of partying and drinking alcoholic beverages with her friends Saturday night when the four of them decided to get into her Mercedes and head out. The group of five entered the 1989 Mercedes-Benz at around midnight and drove through Skid Row.
As Chavez made a fast right turn at an intersection, she lost control of her vehicle, which rode onto the curb and struck two people that were sleeping on the public street.
A man and a woman were who were sleeping next to a wall were violently dragged under the car for about fifty feet until the vehicle came to a complete stop, NY Daily News reported what police and a witness said.
Using the Jaws of Life, emergency workers were able to extricate the victims from beneath the car.
“All of a sudden it was like, ‘boom,’” a witness told KTLA “When I looked, I saw a car, it scraped this part of the wall right here where the people were sleeping. And then it hit this thing… and slipped and came to a stop.”
The man said the car was smoking when it stopped, and the woman under the car was “bleeding bad.”
Authorities declared both homeless people dead on the scene.
Some of the people that were in the car at the time of the accident fled the scene. Chavez and the car’s owner stayed behind to face authorities and own up to the damage. They were arrested on the scene.
Chavez was booked into Los Angeles County Jail on counts of vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. A bail of $100,000 was set for her.
The names of the homeless victims and the other people riding in the car have not been released to the public.
Skid Row is an area of downtown L.A. that for years thousands of homeless people have called home or a place to sleep. According to a year 2000 census, a reported 17,740 homeless make up the population of the district. It is the largest stable homeless population in the United States. Many of the people set up cardboard boxes along the sidewalk to mark their sleeping territory for the night.
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